


The Wilderness

by Speechwriter (batmansymbol)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Lovecraftian, Minor Character Death (referenced), Pining, Post-War, Weird fiction, love is the only grounding force in a surreal universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:33:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26264248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/batmansymbol/pseuds/Speechwriter
Summary: August, 2011. A shapeless, colourless Unhole has appeared in the Department of Mysteries. Luna Lovegood, now a magical theoretician, is hired as a consultant to determine the nature of the phenomenon. But the thirteen years since the war have left her increasingly isolated, and the closer she comes to the Unhole, the more it begins to unravel her.H.P. Lovecraft-inspired post-war fic. Canon-compliant except epilogue. Luna/Ginny.
Relationships: Luna Lovegood/Ginny Weasley
Comments: 6
Kudos: 47





	The Wilderness

**Author's Note:**

> hello! welcome to this luna lovecraft fic. though inspired by lovecraft's work, it's neither a pastiche of his style nor an outright crossover with his work (there are no elder gods here). it is certainly weird, though.
> 
> potential trigger warning for ... i guess, feelings of ... the best way i can put it is allegorical suicidal ideation? let's say 'empty and depressive thought patterns.'

* * *

_“… from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary … temperamentally unfitted for the formal studies and social recreations of my acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world …”_

_— H.P. Lovecraft, “The Tomb”_

* * *

**_August_ **

Luna descends into the Department of Mysteries in the twilight hours. It wouldn’t do for the rest of the Ministry of Magic to see her arrive, to know that anything irregular has happened in the undefined space beneath the complex. The rumours need no feeding.

Her guide through the Department is a man named Connors. He is of medium height and weight, with an almost purposefully forgettable face; even while looking at him, Luna has the sense that she can’t identify him. His voice is neutral and unmemorable as he describes the terms of the consultancy, should she be selected from the final list of candidates. Luna asks no questions. She follows his cloaked shoulders through the black labyrinth of hallways, then into a blue-lit room where shimmering brains swim through a long aquarium. From this room, they enter a narrow back corridor and halt before a black door emblazoned with a long-faded title:

_The Chamber of the Small Mystery of Epiphany_

Connors taps the door with his wand. It swings open, and Luna enters.

Like most rooms in the Department of Mysteries, the chamber is unusual. It has only one wall, curving above and around and below, made of a reflective material several shades darker than a mirror. When Luna surveys the room, she sees herself every so often, very small and far away, a scrap of blonde hair atop shabby blue robes, darkened as if she is a photograph rubbed with ash.

Mostly, though, she sees the Unhole, hovering in the centre of the chamber.

Luna gazes into the formless thing. The Unhole has no discernible shape or colour. From some angles in the room’s mirrored surface, it appears only inches wide, but from others it is twice the height of a grown man. It is neither dark nor suffused with any kind of light. Its surface looks like the backs of the eyelids, or like the kaleidoscopic visual shock in the comedown after exposure to brilliant light; that is to say, it looks essentially like nothing.

It is there and not there. Luna knows something about that.

* * *

**_September_ **

Luna receives the hiring offer from the Department on a Monday. She owls back immediately with her acceptance, and the contract flies in an hour later. The consultancy will begin on Tuesday evening.

“ _Impervius,”_ she says, tapping the contract with her wand before ushering the indignant owl back into the rain.

She’s smiling as she shutters the window. Ginny will be pleased. She’s always wishing that Luna had more regular, reliable work, and Luna loves to tell Ginny good news. She loves the way Ginny throws her arms wide in response as if she’s welcoming the good fortune into the centre of her chest.

But as Luna settles at the rickety card table beside the window and watches owl and envelope fold into the clouds, she feels herself disconnecting gently from the sight. This happens sometimes in moments of particular pleasure or pain. She is carried into a pocket of memory where her father still seems to exist in the present tense, where he tells her he’s proud of her and he loves her and she will do wonderful things. In these moments she tries to recreate details of his face or voice, but when she’s honest with herself, she knows she’s probably inventing most of them. After a decade, most memory feels like invention.

Her excitement dims into quiet contentment. Luna looks down at the rain-darkened street, four storeys below. From her bird’s-eye vantage it seems that there are no people in London, only umbrellas bobbing down the black road, only cars crawling along like beetles in jewel tones.

For the first time in a while, she considers writing to Harry, Hermione, or Ron. Unlike most of her work, a consultancy with the Department of Mysteries is something that they would understand, that they could express excitement for in the normal way. Even as she reaches for her quill, though, Ron and Hermione’s children chase each other into her mind, and Harry’s new crop of students flood in after them, a tide of raucous youth, and the urge to write backs shyly into a corner to make space.

Of Luna’s five friends, Ginny is the only one who is still in touch. The other four have their reasons. Neville and his wife Hannah moved to Malaysia at 26 for terminal degrees in Tropical Magifloral Studies, and they only return to Britain for Christmases. The distance is so taxing for Neville’s owl that he can only communicate regularly with his grandmother.

Ron and Hermione may as well be thousands of miles away, too, with Ministry jobs and two children under the age of five. They can scarcely even make time for Harry, who, after a decade as an Auror, eloped with no other than Pansy Parkinson—the media scandal of the new century—and then returned to Hogwarts as Defence Against the Dark Arts professor.

These days, Luna knows only scattered facts about their lives, collected second-hand from Ginny. All six of them still meet annually when Neville is home for the holidays, but the conversation feels more distant to Luna every year, like a strain of music spiralling away into a long tunnel. The others speak about children and godchildren and colourful co-workers, about the daily patterns and negotiations of marriage; Ginny joins in with talk about property ownership and extended family politics and wealth management. As these conversations operate around Luna, she begins to feel that she is part of a ghost society, something that has none of the hallmarks of real life, only vague imprints of what the rest of the world experiences.

Luna knows it isn’t her friends’ fault. She can feel them reaching out toward her when they ask about her work. Unfortunately, the work is difficult to explain. A sample: every once in a while Luna will excavate a magically concealed scroll from a cave in Oman or a tablet from a site in Norway, and she’ll tear apart the spell language contained in the ancient documents, and then she’ll go to a remote field and speak the partitioned syllables one by one, wand held out before her, half-waiting for the effects to kill her the way spell experimentation killed her mother. She makes detailed notes about the results, the way the world jitters around her or the wand trembles in her hand, just the nascent edge of reaction. She sleeps with certain magical substances smeared on her eyelids or across the backs of her teeth and awakens in agony or ecstasy and transcribes the effects with shuddering fingers. She performs tests on her wand, gauging how close her body must come for the wood and core to react to her incantations. She attends biannual conferences in Atlanta or Nanjing, where forty to fifty other theorists lie prone in the dark, pressing their wandtips into the bases of their skulls in the silence, until they trigger undirected and spontaneous magic: flocks of birds erupting from their palms, hiccups that sound like ethereal music, the abrupt breaking of bones. (Medics stand by.)

The ultimate question of ontomagical theory is this: what is magic, and by proxy, what are we? There is no answer, of course, but the question leads Luna into deeper cracks of the world every year. The question has led her to the Unhole.

* * *

“I didn’t know the Department of Mysteries could hire consultants,” says Ginny from the table.

“They haven’t for decades,” Luna says with some strain. Her body is halfway into the oven, her wand probing at its dark interior cavities. The whole appliance is expanding and contracting fractionally around her like a breathing body. She was making a raspberry torte three or four weeks ago when this started happening. She still isn’t sure what she did wrong, but of course, things are always going askew around her.

“What is it, anyway?” Ginny asks. “What’s the job?”

“They’d like me to examine a phenomenon inside the Department. I’m afraid I can’t tell you more than that.”

“Right. Of course.”

Eventually Luna withdraws from the oven and, kneeling on the kitchen tiles, glances toward the table. Ginny, sun-washed, is chewing a biscuit and looking out the window. The clouds have cleared, and the late afternoon light tints her auburn brows with gold, makes the point of her chin glow like a struck match.

Luna thought Ginny would like the news, but Ginny, always so effusive, the first to cheer and celebrate, has not said a word of congratulations.

“You don’t want me to do it,” Luna says.

Ginny sighs and swipes chocolate crumbs off her lip with the flat of her thumb. “No,” she admits. “I don’t. I hate that place.”

“It pays very well, is the thing.”

“I’ll pay you to stay out of there.”

Luna smiles, but she isn’t sure it’s a joke. Now that Ginny is captain of the Harpies, she picks up every tab, pays for every dinner, and brings by gifts without any occasion. _I saw this and thought, that’s Luna,_ she said last February, unfolding a luxurious new bedspread over Luna’s threadbare blanket— _not quite Ravenclaw blue, I know, but close._ Just last week she unpacked two bulging bags of groceries into Luna’s empty refrigerator, sheaves of lush greens and hanks of prime-cut meat, saying, _I was picking up a few things for myself anyway._

Luna never protests. Ginny’s new enough to wealth and obviously still feels a rush from spending money on other people. She buys shots of firewhisky for strangers at bars and there’s an afterglow to it, an eager generosity she had no opportunity to express as a child or adolescent.

Luna feels a glow from the gifts, too, a different kind. When Ginny arrives carrying a new kettle or a Honeydukes variety basket for them to eat together, it means that she thought of Luna unprompted while walking through Diagon Alley or Hogsmeade. In a universe that contains endless distraction, Ginny chose to hold Luna in her mind, and that makes Luna feel rooted, like she properly exists in the world.

Besides, the help goes a long way. Luna lives in a studio flat half the size of Ginny’s living room, and even then she’s always on the brink of eviction. Though Luna is well-regarded academically, with eighteen articles translated into a dozen languages, the fact remains that there is nearly no money in independent theoretical research. That goes double for someone with a microscopic specialty in ontological magic.

Now she settles into the chair opposite Ginny. “I’m afraid I’ve already taken the job, so it’s late for persuasion.” She sips her own tea. “Are you sure you aren’t biased against the Department of Mysteries because of our last visit?”

“Yeah, could be,” Ginny says. “Or maybe I’m biased against the Department because they think they’re above transparency. Anything could happen in there.”

Luna hums in reply and brushes her fingertips over the plants on her sill. A pair of Goldenteeth snap playfully at her thumb, and her Kittenstail twines its furry stems around her index. As she strokes the Kittenstail, the plant begins to purr.

“Are _you_ sure,” Ginny adds, watching Luna’s fingers, “that you aren’t biased _toward_ the Department?”

“Why should I be?”

Ginny’s eyes flick up to Luna’s. It’s amber, that look, something trapped inside it.

“I know not everything different is dangerous,” Ginny says. “But some things are.”

The sweet taste of honey lingers on Luna’s tongue, and that sweetness fills her body as she sees that Ginny is worried. Luna lets the fact stir around her for a moment like a summer breeze. Even when Ginny comes with empty hands, this is what she brings. She cares what happens to Luna.

“Yes,” Luna says, her voice softer than usual, “I see what you’re saying. I’ll be careful.”

“Good. Right. Keep me posted, then.” Ginny is standing now, an unusual tinge in her cheeks, and tugging her scarf down from the curtain rod. “See you soon?”

“Soon,” Luna agrees.

As Ginny shrugs on a jacket of pale blue dragonhide, Luna stays seated, stirring her tea absentmindedly. Ginny always leaves this way, without explaining what she’s doing next, or making a farewell out of it at all. They see each other too often for that. In some ways, Luna likes this—the fact that continuity is so assumed between them that goodbye has left their vocabulary. Still, whenever Ginny makes to go, Luna wants to ask where it is she’s going. Sometimes she even has the urge to say, _You could stay a bit longer, if you’d like._

But whenever she imagines speaking the words, they sound small and lonely in her mind, like a plea. Ginny has a dozen affectionate teammates, scores more friends and acquaintances, and thousands of admirers across the country. The life waiting for her beyond Luna’s walls is vibrant and immeasurable, and Luna doesn’t want to keep her from it.

So when Ginny glances back from the fireplace, Luna says nothing, only smiles faintly. Ginny half-smiles in return, shaking back her hair, hints of copper glowing in its fiery red. She’s arranging her scarf with one hand, taking a pinch of Floo Powder with the other, slipping one foot into its shoe, knocking its heel nimbly against the edge of the hearth to nudge it into place. Ginny is momentum, every part of her always in transit. Luna sits at the table, unmoving, and watches her go.

* * *

The first night of the consultancy, Luna receives the Department’s files on the Unhole, a stack of parchment as thick as her thumb. Connors offers no guidance and asks no questions about what she has planned. He only says that they’ll expect a progress report at the end of the eight-week period, then leaves, sealing her into the mirrorwall.

Luna sits before the Unhole, which hovers weightless and soundless overhead, and begins to read.

_**PHENOMENON:** Multidimensional unresponsive entity of unknown origin, material, or intent, termed ‘Unhole’_

**_LOCATION:_** _The Chamber of the Small Mystery of Epiphany (CSME)_

_Background: The CSME project was decommissioned in the early 1740s. While in use, it recreated memories of epiphany, which appeared underfoot in the Chamber like a timeline, leading from ignorance to truth. As one walked over the timeline, they reexperienced the emotions of the memory, which played around them in the wall._

_The CSME project was responsible for the development of the Pensieve, a more portable, more powerful, and more flexible instrument. Soon the power of the Pensieve outstripped that of the CSME, and the project was closed._

_Unspeakable Sabha al-Mansur reopened the Chamber on 2 July with interest in voiding its enchantments and repurposing the space for Project Lucid Dream Transference (I.D. 37789). Upon re-entry, she discovered the Unhole._

The records describe hundreds of inconclusive tests that the Unspeakables have performed since July. Charms, Transfigurations, and powerful curses have sunk into the Unhole with no reaction. Magic-detection devices suggest that the room is empty. Objects pressed inside the Unhole—for there is a kind of inside and a kind of outside—do return, in a slow, absentminded way, but attempts to photograph its interior have failed. When developed, the film merely shows the same kind of nondescript blankness as the exterior.

Human trials have been equally inconclusive. When touching the Unhole caused no harm, Sabha al-Mansur slipped into it, tethered by ropes to the outside in case of danger. The Unspeakable returned with no memory of ever having been inside the Unhole, nor of its contents, if there are any, nor of what its interior might look like. Otherwise, she was in perfect mental and physical condition.

Near midnight, Luna sets aside the records to observe the Unhole. The angles of the mirrorwall provide the illusion of motion, although the Unhole does not actually seem to transform. Yet she’s still certain it looks different now than when she entered the chamber.

Its appearance is unusual, of course, but Luna doesn’t want to assume the Unhole is malevolent. She tries never to make judgments based on first instinct. That was one of her father’s first lessons: wait, watch, maintain a separation. Truth comes with distance.

So Luna doesn’t test or touch the Unhole that night. She only observes, and whenever an observation sparks an idea, she writes down relevant journals. The next night, she returns with stacks of texts and, seated on the mirrorwall before the Unhole’s hovering shape, begins her preliminary research. She reads about Extension Charms gone wrong. She reads about Curdled Charms, soured by time. She reads about Bad Air—a rare effect on some sites subjected to too many incantations, which must then undergo magical deflation.

All of these subjects remain mostly in the practical, and Luna is aware that she wasn’t hired for the practical, but after ten years’ worth of pressing herself up against the inexplicable, she knows that there is no correct way to begin. The way into the truth is never what you expect.

* * *

Luna realises quickly that there will be no life outside the consultancy. Every hour is bathed in the surreal twilight of her nocturnal schedule. When she arrives home at 5 a.m., the streets are empty, the sky a tortured non-colour outside her windows. She fixes herself what is both dinner and breakfast, eats without tasting, then sleeps under Darkening and Muffling Charms until afternoon. Sleep is riddled with vivid dreams about cliffsides or basements.

When she awakens and lifts the sensory charms, the world snaps into full light and volume immediately. Car horns blare below. Voices pierce the thin walls. Luna trudges into her bathroom and brushes her teeth to the declining light of mid-afternoon. By the time she feels awake, the world is already retreating into its shell after a day well-lived.

She realises that she never mentioned her new schedule to Ginny. She sends an owl saying that the late afternoon is a fine time to Floo, and prepares ways to dodge Ginny’s inevitable questions about the job, anticipating how Ginny might laugh or scowl, pester or plead, eyes glittering as she tries to wheedle out information.

After several days, though, there’s no word, so Luna sends a second owl. _Tea tomorrow?_ This owl, too, goes unanswered.

Luna isn’t sure what to make of it. Ever since Ginny moved out of Lee Jordan’s flat last year, Luna has seen her every three or four days, usually with owls in between. Luna isn’t sure the level of closeness they have is strictly normal, even among friends. Last November, when Luna came home from an excavation, Ginny was already puttering around Luna’s own flat, having cooked a feast-sized meal as a surprise to welcome her back to London. And during Ginny’s spring tournament with the Harpies, they traded owls from abroad near daily, Ginny describing Prague and Istanbul and the rest with many underlined words and exclamation points, Luna describing the forest where she was performing experiments on a tree with marble leaves. Luna still remembers some of the things Ginny wrote. _Quidditch is wonderful and everything but honestly I just want to be back in your flat while you’re making those puff pastries you do with the ricotta. … I’m stealing three minutes to finish this letter before we kick off against Munich—just want you to know that holy shit! I really really fucking miss you—don’t know if I’m just getting old or something but it’s so much effort with everyone else._

As Luna enters the Department of Mysteries on the tenth night, she wonders if Ginny is angry with her for taking the job despite her advice. It isn’t like Ginny to retract when she’s angry, though. It would be more normal for her to storm in through the Floo uninvited and tell Luna she’s being incautious. That sort of thing has happened a few times.

In all likelihood she’s simply busy. Luna forgets sometimes, but Ginny is very famous. Last year she was made left-flank starter for the national Quidditch team, which earned a fourth-place finish at the World Cup—England’s best in 52 years. Commentators were starstruck as much by Ginny’s casual magnetism in interviews as by her speed and ferocity in the air. Now Ginny is invited to so many events that she cannot keep track of them. She is a favourite on Wireless programmes. Her overflowing social calendar is a running joke between her and Luna.

Or, Luna thinks with a slow turning sensation in her abdomen, maybe Ginny has met somebody. It’s been a year and a half since Lee.

Luna’s hands clasp behind her and then unclasp, her fingers moving in a clumsy, uncertain way as she passes by the brains in their tank. Really she shouldn’t be thinking about this. Really it’s not productive to consider Ginny’s hypothetical love life, or to think about how it makes her feel. Really she should stop remembering the day Ginny ended things with Lee, April 14th of last year, and the way it felt to hear the news—the kind of limp relief the body feels after strenuous exercise.

For a year and a half, Luna has done well in not interrogating that feeling. And since much longer than that, since summer afternoons on the Hogwarts grounds, Luna has done well in letting herself look at Ginny—the mercurial features shifting from listlessness to exaggerated indignation to bright delight—without asking herself why she doesn’t want to blink. Nor does she ask herself about the urge to avert her eyes when Ginny kisses one of her boyfriends hello or goodbye. She doesn’t examine the heat that needles every inch of her when Ginny describes a one-night fling in careless, vivid detail.

There are so many larger and more important questions, questions of magic and reality, the ones that Luna was brought into this world to ask. That’s her parents’ legacy: the ability to prise open her mind and widen her perspective until she ascends completely out of the muck of earthly distraction. She must always ask the right questions.

So it’s a relief when she enters the Chamber of the Small Mystery of Epiphany and sees the Unhole hanging ahead, weightless and unmoving.

Luna lets out a breath. Thoughts of the mystery engulf her, flushing out thoughts of Ginny. Her mind feels quieter, safer.

After ten nights alone with the Unhole, she’s come to feel comforted by its silent, ever-changing constancy. In the half-light of the subterranean Chamber, it is hard to conceive of the outside world existing. There is only her body and magic, as it should be.

That night, she performs her first diagnostic tests on the Unhole. It doesn’t react, which is a relief. She feels guilty issuing spells, many of them quite violent, into the heart of this thing that has done nothing to her.

The Unhole is not so different from a human being, she thinks. It has reliable but inexplicable properties. It keeps its truths inside.

* * *

At the two-week mark, Luna clears the journals away. The most useful point of comparison, she’s decided, is one of her own papers, written on a phenomenon she encountered four years ago. That summer, she’d crafted a heptagon out of wandwood that sensed areas of concentrated magic. The sensor led her to a field in the Outer Hebrides where a magical knot had formed five feet underground, entangled with the ribs of an old human skeleton. The Unhole reminds Luna of the magic in the bones, furtive and unexplained.

In the Hebrides, as far as Luna could determine, the dead witch’s magical essence had formed an unusually strong attachment to her body and was unwilling to dissolve away from her remains, despite the absence of a soul. Eventually, after much fruitless experimentation, Luna managed to disconnect the knot from the skeleton by bringing magical creatures to interact with the bones. The animals’ presence seemed to soften and distract the magical essence.

Hordes of people dismissed the ensuing paper, and Luna’s whole experience, as a hoax. That’s always happening with ontomagical phenomena. _She doctored those photographs,_ people raged. _All this rubbish about “pure magic” … magic isn’t anything outside of a person, or a creature, or an object._

It didn’t surprise her that the paper touched a nerve. The idea that magic can act separately from a magician’s intent, and that when you die, your magic might cling to your bones like a stubborn parasite … Luna can see how these notions might trigger feelings of invasion, even violation, in normal people. After all, if you can’t control your magic, part of your own body, what _can_ you control?

But Luna remains undisturbed. She supposes she has no illusions of control. Perhaps this stems from the universe she occupies, parallel to that of most people, where a mother can die spontaneously before your eyes in childhood. It’s a universe whose inhabitants decide capriciously whether to mock, shun, or accept you, based on criteria that are invisible to you. Luna’s life has never felt like a craft she can steer, but like a current that bears her, and why should magic be any different? Why should magic be controllable or even fully comprehensible?

When Luna was young she used to yearn for knowledge and understanding. Now she has set understanding aside and settled for knowledge alone, fragments of fact tumbling unanchored through a world that has no discernible shape. She can’t be certain why the magical knot in the Hebrides formed its special attachment, nor why the creatures affected it. In truth, she doubts that a concrete explanation exists. The further she walks into magic, the more she feels it is a wilderness, infinitely large and disorganised, inhospitable verging on hostile, blithely throwing together the painful, the beautiful, and the repulsive: see the way magic loved a woman so much it clung to the avatar of her decay.

“But I don’t think you’re clinging to anything,” Luna murmurs, looking up at the Unhole. “You don’t move, you don’t reject anything, you don’t shy away … yes, you’re very calm, very open. I feel that about you.” She pauses, makes a note, and smiles. “We have most of those things in common, actually.”

In the wake of her words, she thinks she senses a kind of pleasure in the air, like the contented silence among a happy family. In all likelihood it’s her own serenity she’s feeling, but she notes it down anyway.

When she takes the Floo home that night, she steps out of the fire into her darkened flat, brushes ash from her robes, and thinks she will probably miss dinner, her bed looks so tempting. But then, while brushing her teeth, she rests her hands on the sink in her bathroom and feels something pulsing inside it.

She hesitates, then wraps her hands more firmly over the porcelain.

Yes. Something is there: an aliveness. The coolness of the ceramic is like the coolness of skin. There is something mutually sensory in the touch.

She reaches tentatively for the sink’s handles and turns them. It feels like lifting a person’s arms or tugging on their hair. The sink feels awake, the same way as her breathing oven.

Luna draws her hands back with the sudden feeling that she is being invasive.

She owls for a Hex Diagnostician the following afternoon, but she isn’t entirely surprised when the Diagnostician opens the breathing oven and can’t detect anything out of the ordinary. The woman places her hand on the metal that, to Luna’s eye, is flexing ever so slightly, and asks what the problem seems to be. She even asks in a colleague, who runs his wandtip carefully over the bathroom sink, making it shiver, and looks at Luna nonplussed. The man apologises and glances to his colleague and asks what exactly they’re meant to be diagnosing.

Luna thanks the Diagnosticians and pays them. That night, she says to the Unhole, “Are you changing my flat?”

She walks around it, considering. The oven must have awoken in August after she returned from her preliminary interview—and the Department’s notes include nothing like this, which means she somehow stepped into new territory from the very beginning.

Her exposure to the Unhole is changing her perception. And with the Diagnosticians blind to the changes, it must be her perception alone.

“I don’t mind,” Luna says to the Unhole. “If you’re trying to communicate something to me, you can keep going, if you’d like. I’ll try my best to understand.”

The Unhole does not react, but the invitation does seem to take. Over the course of the week, dozens of items in Luna’s apartment stir to life. Luna’s favourite mug begins to feel like a hand in hers. Lying on her mattress is like lying on a large and welcoming beast. When she kneels on the rug to inspect the floor, she finds that the fibres are all moving infinitesimally toward her like cilia in fluid. She is seen and felt, not in a sinister way but a curious one.

Luna knows that if the Unhole is affecting her perception, then it must be changing her somehow, exuding something into her. Yet none of the Department’s tests detected any magical emissions. So Luna brings in Muggle detection devices, Geiger counters and barometers, thermometers, even some ghost-hunting equipment from a Muggle company in Bristol. Nothing. She extinguishes the globelike lamps in the room and casts other kinds of light upon the Unhole, ultraviolet, near-infrared. Nothing. She sleeps in the room with dreamcatching spells woven all around her, wondering about psychic intrusion. Nothing.

She considers contagion. Has she been infected with something? She visits St. Mungo’s and undergoes a battery of examinations. A Healer tells her she seems to be perfectly normal, then looks confused when Luna laughs.

She begins to keep a journal during her visits to the Unhole, knowing documentation is important whenever perception is at stake. She’s never kept a personal journal, never even tried, and she’s surprised by how comforting it feels to look onto a page and see a document of her old self, aware of itself, moving and changing in the past, asking questions from which she’s moved on in the hours since she lowered the quill.

The feeling is something like friendship, Luna muses. By going over her own journal, she is joining two of herselves. She is connecting every self who is clamped between the covers—a record like an accordion like a river like a consciousness. She writes,

_I am seated beneath the Unhole. The mirrorwall feels like a frozen stream beneath me, and the clothes upon my body are like a multitude of fingertips, but in general this chamber is quiet. There are only a few consciousnesses, unlike my flat, where vases and windowpanes and gemstones from my travels and books in their stacks are all, one by one, becoming aware of me. Not as aware as human beings, certainly, but sensate in their own way. It’s beginning to happen at the Ministry, too. When I return in the late evenings, each polished floorboard braces itself for my weight, and the screaming of the lifts has taken on a mournful air. I use the stairs now whenever possible._

_I am curious whether these effects will, eventually, enable the Unhole to communicate with me. It’s admittedly strange to witness such a palpable change in myself, but I don’t feel afraid or nervous. My mother spent a great deal of time under the influence of mind-altering charms and substances, and she was still invariably herself, though operating in different modes of that self. If my senses are transforming, it means that I am gaining new information, and that, as my father taught me, is always an unmitigated good._

_I would only be afraid to be tugged away from the centre of myself if I felt that centre to be a fixed or precious thing. Why should I rescue or preserve anything about myself, necessarily? In all likelihood, what I am now is only an unimportant paving stone in the road on the way to you, reading this, the eventual answer, you who have truth and knowledge, my future eyes._

* * *

“I really don’t see how you’re doing it,” she says to the Unhole one night, finally approaching it and dipping the side of her hand into it. It’s the first time she’s touched it, and the experience feels like nothing. There is no change in temperature, texture, or gravity. Her hand moves out of sight as if behind something, then back into view unchanged.

Her words, like all other stimuli, are lost into the Unhole, only returned insofar as they echo off the walls. The echo is familiar by now. Most days the Unhole is the only person she speaks to.

Luna has grown interested in the way it feels to speak to the Unhole. If its effects aren’t physical, then the connection must have to do with consciousness or awareness. She doesn’t think the Unhole is sentient in the way a person might be, but it clearly has some affinity with sentience, given the way it is infusing her world with aliveness. In some ways it reminds her of Ginny, who, too, can walk into the rooms of Luna’s life and stir them awake.

The thought of Ginny jars.

Luna frowns, thinking of her most recent owl. _Tea tomorrow?_ That was three weeks ago now. They haven’t had a three-week break in communication since Luna’s Antarctic excavation, six years ago.

“She’s busy,” she says.

The Unhole’s silence feels somehow curious, inviting, so Luna adds, “My friend Ginny. She hasn’t answered my owl because she’s busy, but she’ll write when she has the time.”

Yet doubt darts through Luna, something like the sting of a static shock, and the questions she must not ask poke through her defences. Could it be that Ginny’s silence is actually intentional? During her last visit, did Ginny perhaps see the way Luna was looking at her in the late afternoon sunlight?

Did Ginny finally understand the way Luna has looked at her for sixteen years now, in the silent darkness of the Hogwarts halls during their sixth year as they painted rebel messages on the walls, in the fields near the Burrow where they walked the evening of Ron and Hermione’s wedding and muddied the hems of their bridesmaids’ dresses?

“No,” she murmurs in answer to the questions.

She thinks she feels something sceptical from the Unhole then, although maybe those are her own defensive feelings at play.

“No,” she repeats with more certainty. “Ginny’s a very well-known Quidditch player. If anything, it’s impressive that this doesn’t happen more often.”

If anything, Luna thinks, she’s lucky that she still has Ginny as a friend at all. Doesn’t Luna know herself by now? Yes. She has known since even before Hogwarts that she is a strong flavour, and people may not mind sampling it, but they will not want to live with that taste in their mouths. When she thinks clearly, with three weeks’ distance, it seems mad for her, Luna Lovegood, to expect constant access to Ginny Weasley, the beloved, the golden, who beams out from the front pages of magazines when Luna passes through Flourish and Blotts.

Luna has the feeling of holding onto an oiled rope, which is slithering away through her fingers as something tied to its other end moves farther from her. The feeling isn’t necessarily new. She felt it when Neville moved abroad. She felt it after Ron and Hermione had Rose and then Hugo within the space of a single year. When Luna received the owl from Harry about his marriage to Pansy and his acceptance of the Defence post, she somehow knew that he would soon withdraw from her life, too.

Luna feels a slow, soft pain like a delicate sunburn. She knows she cannot change people’s hearts or the way the world will unwind. She must, as always, be occupied by her own lot—the real questions, the deep questions. The rest must be soft focus.

Yet she remembers how it felt. Interconnectedness. Looking up at the Unhole, she remembers being twenty and having dinners with her friends. New peacetime was still hovering beautifully over the world, then, like dust glimmering in sunlight. The six of them had only just finished growing into their bodies. There was a restaurant they visited together weekly for years, an Italian trattoria at the top of Diagon Alley with magical murals on the walls, whose animal and human inhabitants gambolled around the restaurant and pantomimed silent greetings to the guests. Ron gave names to some of the humans, many of them inappropriate, and sometimes he and Harry and Ginny voiced conversations between the paintings about their sordid sexual lives. Hermione and Neville would shoot nervous looks over their shoulders while Luna gasped with laughter, tears coming to her eyes.

They did stumble into conversational trenches, of course they did. In retelling a story about Hogwarts, they’d mention someone they’d realise at once had died, a Colin Creevey or a Lavender Brown or a Dobby, and that always led to silence. Sometimes Harry, Ron, or Neville—all Aurors at the time—were assigned to the cases of Death Eaters they knew, and Luna found herself sinking into the five months she’d lived in the cellar of Malfoy Manor, kept in that lightless place like a grub, muscles wasting, eyes aching for light, body itching with filth, listening to the Death Eaters’ voices drift down from the drawing room.

And, of course, sometimes her father was mentioned. Xenophilius had died just before Luna’s twentieth birthday, following complications from the Death Eaters’ torture. For much of the last three years of his life he was insensate, and when he was awake, he couldn’t speak to her. Every night, she attended his bedside at St. Mungo’s, looking into his blank face, and kept up a single-sided conversation. She spoke about the _Quibbler’s_ operations and suggested which Crumple-Horned Snorkack sighting routes they should try when he was better. The words sounded senseless even to her own ears. Eventually she watched him recede like the colour of sunset. Then he was gone.

For years afterward, thoughts of him caused not acute pain but moments of debilitating numbness. In those moments Luna looked down at the dinner table and saw her hands moving on the tablecloth like empty gloves in low wind. She was unable to feel her body. And sometimes she looked around at her friends and saw the same feeling in their faces. They would all slip out of themselves and away from the table and into a world that no longer existed. She didn’t know where the others went in those moments, but she could spot the absence in them. They used to have that in common.

But then, into the silence, someone would speak. They would be slowly, uncomfortably roused to the present. They would force conversation until it sustained itself, and the quavering lights in Luna’s mind would stabilise, like small fires finally given enough oxygen to breathe.

Luna turned twenty-one, and then twenty-two, and as the years went, the present became more unshakable among them. They accumulated new lives, the texture of which became richer and more detailed than the past. Harry and Ginny’s relationship transformed into a protective friendship, and soon one or both of them were bringing dates to these dinners; often this was an awkward process, and the following week, the whole group would discuss the date like a choosy, somewhat judgmental family.

They spoke about things like the week’s weather. Recipes for dinner and news about mutual acquaintances. They commented on the richness of sauces and the soft coldness of mozzarella. These things felt meaningful to Luna. Other days, they took each other out into the world, to loud, sticky bars or woodland paths where they would walk, often for hours, never speaking about Fred or Xenophilius or Sirius Black, sometimes not speaking at all. In hours of distraction, they carried each other out of the war.

A cramp in Luna’s neck returns her to her body. She is thirty again and looking up at the Unhole. She isn’t sure how long she’s been standing stock-still; she doesn’t even realise her face is wet until she takes a step and feels the air touching the damp lines on her cheeks like a fingertip. The memories were so vivid. They all needed each other then.

She swallows and finds that her throat is sore. She realises she’s been speaking it all aloud in clumsy, inadequate language, confessing the contents of her memory to the Unhole. She has never spoken any of this before. To say it feels like bidding goodbye.

The Unhole does not make any sign of commiseration with what she’s told it—but neither does it deny her. Neither does it push her away or retreat from her. It is perfectly neutral, and to Luna that feels like the most perfect kind of warmth. It’s difficult to feel disconnected when the Unhole is listening, when in response, it is bringing the very world to life around her. Thank you, she manages to say, smiling, wiping her cheeks. Yes, I see now, it’s a gift you’ve given me, thank you.

* * *

Luna begins to slip outside of time. Hours are long, days are brief, seconds are slow, minutes are instantaneous. When she whirls home in the emerald fire in the pre-dawn, the flat bristles and pulses and breathes around her like a biome. She is surrounded by slight, undeniable motion that both suggests the passage of time and smooths all that over, the way the endless surge of a surf across sand is both a clock and a cycle.

Nights pass, vaguely leaved upon each other like the overlap of indistinct sounds, and Luna notes the changes while she waits for epiphany.

_I am seated beneath the Unhole. Time has closed into a circular track. I awaken at my unusual hours and decamp from my bed into the wilderness. I come here, to the Unhole, and then I return home, and in all my waking hours I am never alone. I am surrounded by an ocean or a jungle, the constant pulse of life, and I recognise every element and they all recognise me._

_Moreover, I have begun to understand that these elements were conscious all along. It isn’t the universe’s component parts that have awoken but my own mind, now sensitive to a permanent reality in a way I failed to be before._

_I wonder if this is the way normal people feel all the time, as if they live in a world that responds to them, as if they are part of a vibrant landscape. In many ways I feel more a part of the world than I ever have, like a hot object in cool liquid whose surroundings are finally warming to equilibrium, or maybe I am ice, coming apart in heat._

Yes, she says, looking up at the Unhole, but why is this happening to me, and not the others who met you?

No answer from the Unhole.

Luna closes her journal. It feels arrogant to assume that she is in some way special, that the Unhole chose her. Perhaps the Unspeakables didn’t recognise the signs of the Unhole trying to connect with them, or perhaps they felt a kind of fear or resistance that repelled the Unhole’s efforts. She reaches for the records and pages through to the name: Sabha al-Mansur, the woman who walked into the Unhole. It would be worth asking her how she felt in the days after her excursion inside.

I’ll be back in a moment, Luna tells the Unhole, standing.

On her first night, Connors provided her a map of the Department, clipped onto the records. Now she follows the corridors toward the Unspeakables’ meeting room. Through the brain room she goes, into the circular black entrance room lit by torches. She proceeds through the Time Room, the ticking golden hall where the bird in its bell jar endlessly breaks from its egg, dies, and reforms. A case of Time-Turners stands rebuilt in the same corner where Luna and her friends once shattered it. All the elements of all these places breathe and shiver and shine around her.

Luna follows the map out of the Time Room into another series of corridors, cool and deserted and dimly lit by flickering torches. The map is quite easy to read, but then she makes what should be the final left turn and sees an unlit corridor before her.

Luna lights her wandtip and holds it over the map with a light frown. There’s no mistaking that this is the right place. The meeting room, according to the map, should be at the end of the hall. She does see the door, there, when she holds her wand high and casts the beam of light further, but the torches along this hall are extinguished. The nearest one wears a thick nest of cobwebs.

Hello? Luna says, as the floorboards and walls flex and exhale.

She walks down the hall and stops, uncomprehending, before the door. The wood is splintered with age and hanging loose on one of its hinges.

Connors? Luna says. She pushes the door inward.

The place is in a state of disrepair. It may once, decades ago or longer, have been a handsome meeting room, but now the ancient oak floorboards, velvet-cushioned chairs, and the wooden table are furred with dust. A bank of windows, which must once have been enchanted to show a landscape view, look instead into a wall of dirt, packed against the glass, and that glass is not smooth but rippled, speaking to another century.

Yet the smell of the room is familiar. Luna lifts the records to her nose and draws a breath. It is the same scent, rich and mouldering, the scent of old age.

She gazes down at the records again. Were the papers always so worn, their script always so faded, their phrasing always so archaic?

Luna backs out of the room, moving more quickly than before, and follows the map to the Unspeakables’ Records Room. Its walls are comprised of oaken drawers, stacked all the way up to its twenty-foot ceilings. Near the door is a drawer engraved with the word _Personnel._ She tugs upon its handle, and the drawer extends two feet, then four, then six. When she lets go, it hangs there in the air as she thumbs back through the alphabetical records of every Unspeakable who has ever been hired into the department.

Luna thumbs through the folders to _Ci-Cr._ There is no record of an Unspeakable named Connors. When she tries to remember his face or his voice, she realises that nothing remains of him at all.

Her hands move more quickly as she finds _Sabha al-Mansur_ and draws out the witch’s documents. The parchment is yellowed and brittle with age. Luna scans a list of al-Mansur’s assignments and finds it: _Unhole Phenomenon – Unsolved – Location barricaded._ The date beside it reads _2 July, 1794_.

Luna feels as if she is dreaming. She looks down at the parchment, her head throbbing. Suddenly the aliveness of the world around her feels like too much. She cannot think clearly with everything leaning in upon her, the floor pulsing like a heartbeat beneath her soles. Even the parchment in her hands feels like living skin.

In that moment she knows that there is no one else in the Department of Mysteries at nights. There is no consultancy. No one has even known that she has entered the Department—no one, that is, except for the Unhole, which has been here for centuries, which summoned her to itself.

Luna replaces the file and closes the drawer. She is used to feeling small and insignificant, but rarely has the feeling ever been so overpowering, as if she might be pinched away from reality any moment. She moves out into the corridors of the Department like a ghost. She passes torches whose flames swish back and forth in her wake like horses’ tails in heat. She feels every shockwave that her footfalls send through the tiles, and the whole Ministry heaves around her, every board and fixture. The earth is a dark beast and she is traveling through its gullet and its organs and the tissues are contracting and heating and cooling around her.

When she returns to the Chamber of the Small Mystery of Epiphany, the Unhole looks the same as ever.

You did choose me, then, she says to the Unhole. Of all the human beings you could have brought here, you chose me to witness the world this way. Why?

The Unhole’s silence seems gentle, like a patient teacher expecting her to speak the answer.

* * *

One day, Luna realises that she cannot remember the last time she spoke to or even saw another human being. The very concept of interacting with a person feels bizarre to her. She feels so distant from people and their thoughts and their miniature lives and their ideas of separation and individuality. She does occasionally leave her flat, but only to Apparate into the countryside, where she walks down dirt lanes and does not feel the cold, although she often wears little more than her nightclothes. Instead she feels the grooves in the earth as if the runnels were drawn into her own skin, and the smooth rolling flesh of the hills as if they are of her own flesh. Most days, of course, she merely sits in companionable silence with the Unhole.

_I am seated beneath the Unhole. I still hope that it will reveal why it called me to be its special companion. If the Unhole does for some reason seek human understanding, why not show itself and these truths to all people, inconsequential though we may be?_

_Of course, the Unhole has been in the Chamber for centuries. Perhaps it has drawn other magicians to itself before._

_Or perhaps not. Perhaps it has been waiting for centuries, waiting for me._

_It’s true that the Unhole summoned me under false pretences, but I forgive its deception. After all, it has revealed reality to me, it has invited me into a world where everything is always together, where connectedness is implicit._

Yet to live in such a wholly interwoven world has its dangers. One night, returning to her flat, Luna trips coming out of the hearth, and her arm catches a decorative plate, and it flips off the mantel and shatters with a tremendous sound on the floor, where just minutes before it was whole and glimmering happily like a smile. Now she’s betrayed it with her clumsiness, and the shock of impact sends her to pieces, too, trying to gather up all the shards until she finally remembers the wand in her pocket and says, fingers gashed and bleeding, _Reparo!_ The plate flies together again, itself, safe, and Luna holds it to her chest, gasping, feeling breakage throughout her body. The pain resounds like light off wet stone.

After that, she uses her wand for every possible action and interaction. She enchants her quill to write in her journal with a flick of the wand. While walking, she uses Lightness Charms to skim delicately over the surface of the earth. Her food prepares itself, but even her consumption of it feels like a violence.

The Chamber is a balm, because outside, in the loud and throbbing world, everything has become painfully raw. In every moment, she feels the universe swollen with life like a sore. Every stone and leaf and doorknob and pane of glass—they all live and breathe and feel, they are all saturated with aliveness. So there is no stillness left anywhere, no calm or privacy, no space for Luna’s little feelings. But that’s reality. She is even less the centre of her life than she always believed herself to be.

One night she tries to reread a favourite book, a memoir and journal about the Common Western Nargle, and finds that she cannot take in more than a few paragraphs. The writing feels pathetically limited. She tries other books, other journals, even old _Quibblers_ , but it’s all the same. It saddens her to see all these human beings writing about their lives and their opinions with such earnest vigour, for Luna knows now that the world is a single multicellular organism of impossible size, and human beings are unable to comprehend the role they occupy upon the grand stage. They are not actors, nor even props, but the motes of dust that flicker in and out of the spotlights. And though Luna herself may be privy to the truth, she knows she is no more than any other human; she is only a witness, less than nothing, a reflection in a mirrored wall.

It is during this train of thought that there is a tap-tap at the window.

Luna looks over from her bed and sees a barn owl sitting patiently on the sill. She stares at it a long minute.

Eventually she flicks her wand to open the window, then flicks it again to summon the note from the owl’s leg.

She knows the slapdash script:

_Floo me in an hour? We just got back from Sweden._

Luna looks down at the hovering slip of parchment for a while, utterly disoriented. It takes a long while for the words to penetrate, and even longer for her to imagine Ginny writing them.

Yes, Luna thinks vaguely. The feeling comes slowly out of her like something surfacing from gelatine. She does want to see Ginny.

It occurs to her that she hasn’t really wanted anything in a while, but she does want this, to see her.

A second feeling comes, too, even more sluggish and reluctant than the first: Luna feels shaken.

The Hover Charm breaks, and the parchment flutters down to the mattress. _We just got back from Sweden._

Luna remembers wondering where Ginny was, in the days when she still had those kinds of microscopic preoccupations. Here is the answer. Ginny was in Sweden, and presumably has been in Sweden ever since Luna became acquainted with the Unhole, and ‘we’ suggests the team, although it could also mean Ginny and another unnamed individual. Either way, the fact is that Ginny didn’t tell Luna about the journey. After their near-constant togetherness, Ginny found it easy to leave Luna suddenly and completely.

Luna looks around at the omnipresent rustle and breath of her surroundings. Yes, she says to it all, yes, I know. Her feelings are so small and impermanent that they’re nearly ridiculous, exactly as inconsequential as the books that she cast aside only minutes ago, impatient with their limited human perspective. Her feelings are hypocritical, her feelings are ultimately meaningless. And when Luna stares into the flat pulsating around her, she wonders, should she really go to see Ginny? What would be the point? Ginny is just another human being, as blinkered to reality as the rest. Ginny will never give her answers about the Unhole or about Luna’s role in the awakened universe. Really Luna should let the note go unanswered.

Yet when she looks down at Ginny’s handwriting again, those feelings throb like the intrusion sites of splinters: minuscule in the scope of her body, but demanding her focus relentlessly. Hurt and want, hurt again, want again. The emotions sharpen as Luna thinks of her. Ginny, child of the verdant countryside. Ginny who turns spirals in the air, who flips and weaves like wind. Ginny who used to plop down at the Ravenclaw table during sixth year, sling her arm around Luna, and casually hex whichever of Luna’s tormentors had charmed a pepper-shaker to pour itself into Luna’s hair or food. Ginny whose eyes are hard caramel in sunlight, and who straightens the shoulders of her friends’ jackets. Ginny, sweat-slicked after matches and throwing her arms wide to welcome good news. Ginny who could have had all of Luna, at any time, if she had ever asked.

Luna remembers Ginny’s crushing embrace at her father’s funeral. Luna closed her eyes at the graveside and dizziness spun her like a top, she tried to gasp for breath, she felt like she was falling into Ginny over and over and over again.

Luna remembers the day that Ginny broke up with Lee, a year and a half ago. Ginny owled her and wrote, please God come over and make me feel like a person again. Luna Flooed over that night, and for long, unstructured hours, they lounged around Ginny’s townhouse with glasses of firewhisky in hand, Ginny wheeling between tears and frustration and guilty relief. They pulled books off the shelves and read excerpts to each other. They turned up the Wizarding Wireless and turned out half the lights and danced to frenzied guitar. They went out at midnight, laughing and tripping on the pavement, and got a pint at the local pub, then went home to Ginny’s place, and around two in the morning they wound up on the topic of the Hebrides, back on the sofa again, Luna’s legs somehow thrown over the pillow in Ginny’s lap. Luna was describing the ribs and the magic and the wilderness and all the incomprehensible rest of it, and Ginny said,

“You know, Luna, does any of this even make you happy?”

Luna just sat there a while without answering. Finally she said, “What do you mean?”

“The way you talk about your work, you’d think magic was all—” Ginny took another gulp of her firewhisky and pulled at the neck of her cashmere jumper. “Not all _bad_ , but empty. And you spend your whole life in that.”

Luna watched Ginny’s fingertip brush her clavicle. “I don’t think it’s an empty thing to accept that you don’t understand something and never will.”

“Sounds like surrender to me,” Ginny said.

“Yes, that’s right. It is surrender. But I don’t mind that.”

Ginny took another sip of her drink while looking hard at Luna, a line between her low straight brows. Then she smiled, twitched her head, and looked away.

“Clearly you agree,” Luna said serenely.

“What?”

“That’s what you just did. In your head. You just had a moment of incomprehension, and decided you didn’t mind, and smiled.”

Ginny laughed and shoved one of Luna’s legs off her lap. “So I’ve surrendered to you, that’s what you’re saying? You’re an impenetrable mystery, and I’m—what?”

“That’s easy.” Luna lifted her leg back into place with dignity. Her words were soft and loose with the whisky. “You’re a second, separate impenetrable mystery.”

Ginny’s smile faded. “You don’t really think that.”

The room felt so still. Luna looked at Ginny and saw a shade of doubt, even sadness. Luna let the firewhisky burn her tongue and tried to decide what to say. She didn’t like lying, and she _did_ think each person was ultimately an impenetrable mystery—but she also knew that Ginny had no use for mystery. Ginny wanted to be known, recognised, legible. As the seventh sibling, as the girl overlooked and lost into Voldemort’s hands, and later as the old flame of The Boy Who Lived, of course self-definition was paramount to her.

Then, head spinning from the drink, Luna considered how readily these facts had risen into her mind. She considered Ginny’s whole history upon the earth, from matchstick girlhood to fatalistic adolescence to this, lying on cushioned surfaces in the midst of a life they’d battled for. She saw Ginny’s life like a path through the thicket. She looked at Ginny and said, “No, I know who you are,” and in a luminous moment like the eruption of a web of sympathetic lightning, Luna felt both knowledge and understanding.

Now Luna feels jarred into her body, as if shaken awake after a year of slumber. She is sitting up very straight in her bed and looking at nothing.

For the first time since she awoke hours ago, Luna climbs out of her bed, motions clumsy. I’m sorry, she says blankly to the small beanbag in front of her desk before settling onto it, because the beanbag is old, and the seams are loose, and she senses its discomfort whenever she sits. Her ink bottle teems like the ocean as she levitates the nib of the quill into it. Once Luna was a great chewer of quills. She would get ink all over her lips and fingertips. The thought horrifies her now. Every barb of this quill is like the fine hair on the back of a neck and she touches it only remotely, the way she touches everything in her life, now that she’s learned her place.

She flicks her wand. Of course, the quill writes out. I’d love to see you.

The words are too forcible. Another flick of the wand, and a new slip of parchment slides out from the stack. The quill writes, Yes. It will be lovely to see you.

This is better, and Luna sends the letter back with the owl and looks around at her flat. She knows the temperaments of everything around her. The steadiness of the oven. The cantankerous moods of the stovetop’s rings. The hypersensitivity of the curtains hanging down from their bar, like long woven sheets of nerve endings. She feels grateful that Ginny didn’t ask to come here. She wouldn’t know how to act as if nothing has changed.

She was at her most human with Ginny. She knew less, but understood more. Perhaps, despite the Unhole’s gifts, she isn’t ready to leave that behind.

* * *

Ginny’s townhouse is in the heart of London, so close to Diagon Alley that she can stroll up the street and see George whenever she likes. Luna arrives just after sundown and Ginny’s standing at the kitchen counter, which is sheeted with magically hardened black opal. Ginny’s head is back, her long red hair damp from the shower, a glass of icy water pressed to her lips. As Luna steps out of the fire, Ginny turns and her freckled face cracks in a smile and she says Luna’s name.

Luna can’t smile back. It is too jarring to see Ginny there, unchanged, wearing a caramel-brown jumper with a crimson letter G woven on it. Like an autumn evening, Luna thinks absently.

Then Ginny is running to the hearth and embracing Luna.

Luna goes rigid. She tries not to breathe, but she was not expecting the hug and eventually she has to inhale, and when she does, she must also acknowledge the sweetly cinnamon smell of Ginny’s jumper. She’s slow to react, to touch Ginny’s back and shoulders. She has been moving so softly through the world that her fingers feel incorrect making contact with Ginny, here suddenly after however long it’s been, Luna couldn’t even say.

Ginny pulls back, then frowns. “You look tired.”

“Yes, I work during the nights,” Luna says, and the words feel oddly on her tongue and teeth and lips, as if she is using new facial muscles that are easily fatigued.

“Every night?” Ginny says, jogging to the fridge and pulling out a bottle of pale violet wine. “They’d better be giving you weekends off.”

She pours the two glasses carelessly, barely looking at her hands, looking only at Luna, yet not a drop is spilled. Every action is a matter of utmost coordination, and Luna can’t take her eyes from it. How could she have forgotten the way Ginny moves? It causes her an inexplicable sadness. Even in this, Ginny is such an effortless part of the world, born for interaction rather than observation.

There is a shrinking feeling inside Luna. She thought it would feel good to see Ginny again. She thought that a shred of the sublime understanding she felt on the whiskeyed night a year and a half ago would return to her. Instead she looks at Ginny and feels as if she is truly another species, and she wishes she were in Ginny’s arms again, and the distance between those two feelings is infinite, she has never felt farther from Ginny, she has never loved her so much, it has never been so painful.

“Luna?” Ginny says. Luna realises she hasn’t answered whatever Ginny said before. She can’t remember what it was now.

“I said, do you work every night?” Ginny says. She seems to have read Luna’s complete distraction from her face, which is disturbing—but that’s what it’s like, Luna remembers, talking to Ginny. Not at all like talking to the Unhole. Ginny is perceptive and reactive, she probes and hunts. Luna suddenly wants to hide her face and body.

“Yes, I work every night,” Luna says hoarsely. “I sent you an owl with my schedule after I started.”

“Right. I haven’t opened my mail yet.” Ginny nods to a small mountain of letters on the counter. “Owling you was the first thing I did when we landed.”

Luna doesn’t answer. She is looking around at the familiar room, which is long and modern, half geometrically zoned living space, half gleaming kitchen with many steel fixtures. Every fixture is very aware of her, the light that glances off metallic surfaces evoking keen eyes.

There is a long moment’s silence.

Ginny sets the glasses on the counter. “Look,” she says, her voice tense, “Luna, I’m really sorry I didn’t owl. I know you must be furious. I didn’t even know we were _going_ to bloody Sweden until half an hour before we left. Out of nowhere, our manager’s running a Portkey up onto the pitch and saying we’ve got a last-minute booking at this really exclusive training camp near Luleå. So, all right, you know how she gets. And of course when we get there, we find out there’s only one owl in the whole place, and the others nearly killed the poor thing sending letters to interviewers they were supposed to meet and appointments they had to cancel and all the rest. I swear I could’ve killed our manager.”

Ginny slips her hands into her pockets, shifting, restless. She takes a hesitant step toward Luna, and now there’s guilt on her face. “That was five weeks, anyway, the camp. But it was just a quick scrimmage tour after that, and I should’ve owled you then. I wanted to,” she adds. “I kept wanting to, but I kept thinking about it on the pitch, or really late at night, and captaining that lot after a month’s training was like herding bloody Kneazles, I hardly had five minutes to myself every day. I mean, I only owled George this Monday, and Ron three days ago, and then I figured, well, I’d be back so soon …”

Ginny trails off. Something about the guilt in her face unnerves Luna.

Luna looks down at herself, her own body. For the first time in days, her hair is clean, hanging in feathery blonde sheets down to her waist. She showered before coming here and only realised how dirty she’d become when small dark curls like clay started rubbing off her skin. She is wearing pale jeans that fit loosely on her legs and a shirt as thin as paper, which has begun to come apart at the neck.

“You don’t have to owl me,” Luna says.

There’s a long silence. When Luna looks back up, Ginny’s face is uncertain. “What does that mean?” she asks. “It’s been a month and a half. You didn’t want to hear from me?”

“I did,” Luna says quietly, “but you don’t have to.”

“It’s not a question of _having_ to,” Ginny says, but Luna is already saying,

“You don’t need to monitor me. I’m not my father.”

As Luna says it, she feels the oiled rope flying through her hands, and then it is gone. She is holding onto nothing. It suddenly seems obvious that this is the role she occupies in Ginny’s life. Luna is slipping out through the cracks of the world and always has been, and Ginny is the figure at the bedside, making sure her charge isn’t alone, knowing she is the only one left.

Of course Ginny would feel guilty, failing to write someone who has no one else.

The truth of it seems so consummate, so perfectly comprehensible, that Luna doesn’t understand why Ginny has gone pale. The skin behind her freckles has drained to the white of the blanket draped over the leather sofa.

“Luna,” Ginny says, coming right up to her, “don’t give me that, all right? I just said I _wanted_ to owl you. I mean, I wanted you to _be_ there. Some of the team had—” Ginny’s gaze slips across Luna’s face, clear brown irises shaded by blonde-red lashes. “They had their girlfriends or boyfriends there. When they brought the Portkey up, I kept thinking, if I could’ve just talked you out of this stupid job, I could’ve Apparated to your place, I could’ve asked if … if you …” Ginny swallows hard. “If you wanted to come.”

She’s looking at Luna with an intensity Luna’s never seen before. That feels like confirmation to Luna. This is Ginny’s desperate attempt to rebury the truth about their relationship. Luna feels herself drifting in space and time; the anchor that was Ginny is lifting, and Ginny was all that was left, and Luna had never before stopped to ask herself if her only friend might only remain out of a sense of obligation.

But, Luna thinks with distant serenity, there’s no need for Ginny to feel obliged anymore. Ginny doesn’t need to waste any more energy holding Luna to society. Luna has left all that behind already. There is little more to be done.

At last she thinks she understands the Unhole. It has chosen her to feel every element of the nonhuman world because she has, herself, little by little, joined it. Thirty years of life and she hasn’t sunk into the human world, thirty years old and each phase of life has been a phase of departure. She has moved so far away from the world of humanity by now that she can finally see it for what it is, including the way people—real people, like Ginny—belong to its texture, while she never will.

She aches to go back into the Department of Mysteries, to recede like a tide into the Chamber of the Small Mystery of Epiphany, where there is nobody and nothing even vaguely comprehensible. Luna can see the Unhole before her even though she isn’t closing her eyes and even though the Unhole is so indeterminate. She has looked into it for so long that its image is before her at all times, not quite turning, not quite transforming.

Real people make excuses before they leave, so Luna knows she can’t simply Disapparate, although she wants to. She glances around the townhouse, which as recently as five weeks ago felt like a second home. Everything is still identifiable to her, all the Weasley family photographs, all the Wizard Wheezes products lined up on the shelves, all the water-damaged novels that Ginny likes to read when she’s soaking her muscles in the tub. The long mantelpiece is moving infinitesimally above the fire like a snake warming itself in the sun.

“Luna?” Ginny says. “Did you hear what I said?”

Then her callused hand is curling around Luna’s upper arm. At the touch, Luna’s eyes stop straying. She looks up into Ginny’s eyes and sees how bright they are. Even now, upon the brink of leaving all this behind, she loves Ginny. She will love her always, up to and over the precipice, she will love her as she falls.

Luna tugs her arm gently from Ginny’s grip. “I’m sorry,” she says before going for the hearth.

When she emerges through the fire into her own home, the sensation of the flat pours over her, and it’s a flood of relief. It’s the very texture of isolation and it’s a masterwork. Luna looks around at every inch, every vibrating, sighing, purring, rubbing, pleasurable inch of it, and she stands and breathes for minutes, something in her wiped blank. She moves outside of her body; everything is soft focus at last. She drifts to the window and looks out at London, at the houses and apartment buildings, and she sees eyes and mouths everywhere. The sky itself looks like the undulating flesh of an immense beast, every star and cloud like a scar, and looking out at it, Luna feels freedom. Yes, she says, I am part of you. She will approach the Unhole and walk into its interior. She’s certain that it will receive her, she has made herself ready. It will fold into itself and they will be together, finally at peace, their togetherness the solution.

She turns back toward the fireplace.

She takes a step.

There is a roar of green flame, and Ginny ducks through. Luna startles backward.

“I know you’re angry, but—no,” Ginny says in a rush, stepping forward onto the rug, twisting its tassels underfoot, and Luna flinches at the twist, draws a sharp breath. Ginny’s voice is low and hard as if she’s furious with herself or maybe with both of them. Luna sees that her cheeks are wet. “I’m not _monitoring_ you, Luna, I’m not sitting at your deathbed like a fucking priest, that’s not what this is. How can you actually say that to me.” Her words and her presence are flooding the tiny flat, inundating Luna, and as Ginny crosses the room her hip knocks into a chair, and Luna moves as if she’s been struck. She feels the disruption as if it were of her own body. Her knees give out, and she topples back to sit hard on the bed.

“Luna?” Ginny says, stopping. “What—what’s wrong?”

Luna tries to breathe, but her head is whirling. It’s too much to have Ginny here in the flat along with everything else. It is too much not to be alone here, in this place where her aloneness has proliferated with such detail. The bed is shifting like a current under her, and she feels seasick. She wants to hold the blanket tightly in her fingers, but it seems to slither, and she has to get it away from her body, and the pillow can’t be touched either because her grip will cause something like a bruise. She can’t hold to anything without fear of damaging it.

So she clutches onto her own forearms so tightly that she feels something wet under her thumbnail, and when she opens her eyes—for they were squeezed tight shut, she registers only after she has forced their lids up fractionally—Ginny’s face is terrified.

“Luna?” Ginny whispers. “Luna?” She sinks to her knees at the bedside and pries Luna’s hands off herself. Luna realises there is blood running down from the ragged edge of her thumbnail. Ginny draws her wand and touches the tip to the crook of Luna’s elbow, to the tear in the skin. A plaster forms over it. “What is it?” Ginny whispers. “Did you take something? Drugs or a potion or something? It’s fine, you can say. We can go to Mungo’s. We can—”

Luna shakes her head, gasping, but when she closes her eyes again she does actually feel drunk. A sick spinning in her head wobbles back and forth on its axis like a top about to fall off its point.

“Okay,” Ginny says. “Just lie down, all right?”

Luna does what she’s told. It’s an immense relief to be given directions. She curls up on the bed and shuts her eyes, and a minute later Ginny is sliding under the blanket and closing her body around Luna’s, drawing the coverlet high over them both. Ginny has taken off her jumper and she’s in some soft slip of a thing under it, her arms naked; she’s wearing terrycloth sweatpants that rub against Luna’s bare legs. Ginny is heat and solidity, and the scent of cinnamon suffuses the air, and all this so completely surrounds Luna that Luna can focus on her, just Ginny in the universe of distraction, and minute by minute, finally, the spinning of Luna’s head slows, and so do her breaths. She is inside her body again, and it feels different than it has the past few weeks, more secure, as if she’s being held in by something more than her own efforts.

“What happened?” Ginny whispers, after a long, quiet moment. “In the Department. What is it?”

“I will never know what it is,” she murmurs, the Unhole on the back of her eyelids, the flat exhaling and inhaling and echoing around her, “but I know what it does. I know how it makes me feel.”

“Then tell me.”

“I feel open,” Luna whispers. “Wide open. I’m dissolving into everything and everything is taking me into itself. But it doesn’t feel wrong. It feels like it was always meant to be this way. My mother’s gone, my father’s gone, I’ve always been a little bit gone, haven’t I? Haven’t you felt it, too, even when we were young, that you need to pull me back into everything? … But it’s not malevolent. It’s not cruel. It’s generous, it’s got room, it’s going to heal everything that I feel. It takes forgotten people. That’s why it chose me.”

Ginny’s arm has pulled very tight around Luna’s waist, one rough palm flat against her stomach, and her knuckle just brushes the underside of Luna’s breast, probably unknowingly, but the touch goes all the way down through Luna’s core. Then Ginny strokes her hair away from the back of her neck, which is sweating and cold until the warm flat of Ginny’s cheek meets it.

Now Ginny’s hand is resting upon Luna’s skull as if the contents are precious. She’s brushing her fingers through Luna’s hair, and although Ginny’s body feels no more alive than everything that’s surrounded Luna the past weeks, the experience still sums to more, because Ginny is holding to her like this really matters, and when Ginny whispers onto the shell of her ear, “You aren’t forgotten,” Luna feels the violent pressure of salt water building in her eyes, scalding the delicate tissues.

“It chose wrong,” Ginny says.

Tears burn and circulate beneath Luna’s eyelids, but she squeezes her eyes even more tightly shut. She feels that if she opens them, Ginny will disappear, a figment of her imagination. Even the thought that she could deceive herself so painfully is unbearable. She makes a small, unintentional sound, and Ginny moves closer against her, over her. Ginny’s soft clothed knee is between hers. Ginny’s feet are in socks and sliding in slow reassurance over Luna’s naked calf, ankle, foot. It occurs to Luna that this is new information too, as much as any revelation of pure magic or ontology. Maybe this is actually the answer to the most important question: the sensation of fingers in her hair, the hand holding tight to the slippery organ of her skin, breath from Ginny’s lungs upon the side of her cheek, Ginny’s body twined so closely into hers that if Luna were to peel away from the face of the planet, the way some part of her has always threatened to do, Ginny would be destroyed alongside her. They are curved in parallel, nested like fossilised ribs, and Luna feels every ounce of what clings between them. She clings back.

* * *

Ginny is with Luna every minute after that. For a while it’s overwhelming to have her in the ecosystem of the flat, because the place is so hostile to Ginny. Everything she touches exudes disturbance, which Luna feels in her own body like nausea. Luna thinks constantly of the Unhole and how it chose her. She feels trapped by the limits of her human body and mind, and she feels occasional surges of resentment toward Ginny, blames her for keeping her here, blames her for yanking her forcibly back into this small, meaningless world. Yet when Ginny meets her eyes those feelings are displaced. The world seems neither so small nor so meaningless.

The first day, Luna can barely speak, and so they spend hours lying in bed, watching Muggle movies on the little flatscreen in the corner as Ginny chortles about Muggles’ ideas of magic. But day by day, Luna’s senses become less raw, and she no longer feels Ginny grating against every element of the physical world. Her waking hours are still a swirl of sensation, but she can stand, move, speak. In mornings, Ginny sits across from Luna at the card table and watches her eat, freckled arms crossed, sweatpants slung low over her hips, before she begins to wolf down her own breakfast. Ginny talks in easy monologues about things like the scrimmage tour matches, which were uniformly unenjoyable. It’s early November now and the matches were all conducted in atrocious conditions, the teams kept from freezing only by virtue of Warming Charms on their brooms and uniforms.

“Thank Merlin we’ve got a break in practices,” Ginny grouses, but Luna isn’t fooled. She drifted awake the previous morning to find Ginny on her knees before the fireplace, her head stuck through the Floo, speaking quietly to the Harpies’ manager about a personal emergency, how she’d need to re-join practices later than the others. Luna closed her eyes and pretended not to have seen.

Luna also knows that Ginny sometimes slips away during the hours that she’s asleep, because in the mornings she’ll find new groceries or things from Ginny’s flat around her studio. But Ginny is always back in bed when Luna awakens, so the first thing she feels is the weight of Ginny’s arms, and the warm curve of her body. The first things she thinks about are the tip of Ginny’s nose and the way her lips part in her sleep and the dark auburn lines of her eyebrows.

They spend several days making large, elaborate meals or doing crafts that Ginny has bought supplies for. They complete puzzles and make sloppy art on cheap canvas.

Then Ginny begins making up small reasons for them to leave the flat. “Fancy a walk?” she’ll say, or, “I heard Quality Quidditch Supplies has in a new anti-slip ointment, mind if we stop by?”

Luna tentatively agrees, suspecting that it will be too overwhelming, but the first walks are brief, only ten or fifteen minutes, and she becomes accustomed to the breeze on her skin, each one an exhalation. Soon she is saying hello to the people they pass on their walks. Soon she and Ginny are seeing occasional acquaintances from Hogwarts in Diagon Alley. They exchange brief conversations, then return home.

With each excursion, the intensity of the awakened world decreases, and the people walking the streets seem comparatively more and more alive, and Luna begins to notice things she’d stopped seeing, the minute changes in people’s expressions as they speak to each other, the way that the sound of laughter is fundamentally pleasurable to her.

In the evenings, Ginny begins to tug Luna down to the local Wizarding pub, two blocks away. It isn’t a special place except that the bartender quickly begins to recognise them. “Merlot and Prosecco,” he calls across the bar, a smile on his round, ruddy face, when Ginny shoulders through the door and Luna drifts in after. He has assigned them these nicknames because of their hair. He knows who Ginny is, of course, but never talks about Quidditch with her or makes romantic overtures, so Luna likes him.

“Yeah, good man,” Ginny says. “You know, it’s a rare man who can talk to a Harpy without trying to prove he knows so much about Quidditch that we should, I don’t know, give him our position as a professional Quidditch player, and also have sex with him immediately.”

“Are they that rare?” Luna says absently. “That’s very sad, isn’t it? I don’t think Harry would do something like that.”

“No, but Ron would.” Ginny’s grinning now. She counts off on her fingers. “George might, if he drank enough. Bill and Charlie wouldn’t, they’ve got nothing to prove. … Oh, but Percy _definitely_ would. He’s got a real chip on his shoulder about Quidditch, seeing as he’s the only one of us who never played for Gryffindor.”

“A shame,” Luna says with a small smile. “I think he would make an excellent Quaffle.”

Ginny shouts with laughter into her firewhisky, and the conversation feels so normal, and Luna is unable to say anything more. This feeling keeps overwhelming her these days in unexpected moments. Partially it’s fondness, but mostly it’s gratitude: a naked, fearful kind of gratitude that makes her want to hide from Ginny, but also to hold onto her by any means necessary.

But Luna sees Ginny’s exertion, too. She sees, and cannot really fathom, the degree to which Ginny has uprooted her own life in order to re-root Luna’s. After two weeks of Ginny living in her flat, the Harpies have a match against the Tornadoes, and Luna has to insist to Ginny that she can leave for a few hours, she must play. Luna can’t attend—the thought of a screaming crowd, the immense, groaning structure of the stands, is painful. But she sits by her hearth cross-legged on a large cushion and listens to the match’s live report on the Wizarding Wireless. Halfway through, the commentator, John Ebsynth, says,

“I’ve never seen Weasley fly like this. Really sloppy, eh, Patil?”

Padma Patil’s familiar voice says, “Yeah, that’s a damn near 30-degree skid on the roundabout there. She looks tired, John. Just not flying like the Chaser we saw last summer.”

“Like day and night,” Ebsynth agrees. “Weasley passes to Xiao—nice Bludger dodge by Xiao there—a pass back to Weasley, right in the scoring area—and—no, it’s a tackle by Tornadoes right-flank Flint.”

“Clearly nothing to him,” says Padma. “The man looks half-disappointed. You know, there’s word Weasley’s been absent from practices. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Luna turns down the Wireless and looks into the flickering fire.

That night, after dinner, the flat is subdued. The Harpies lost by nearly thrice the Snitch margin. Luna’s burning some incense on the mantel and Ginny’s put on a record whose slow chords of distorted guitar land low in the gut. It’s only in the past two days that Luna’s realised she can enjoy these kinds of scents and sounds again. The flat itself plays like background music now, everything thrumming at Luna’s touch.

The bathroom door hangs open. Luna can hear the rapid-fire hush of Ginny brushing her teeth. When Ginny emerges, Luna looks over from the kitchenette, where she is washing dishes. Ginny’s hair is damp, her face is laved in a delicate cream that makes her shine, and she’s dressed for bed in a Weird Sisters T-shirt that hangs halfway down her freckled thighs.

Luna doesn’t want to say anything. She wants this forever. Still, when Ginny leans by Luna to take a glass from the cabinet, Luna says quietly,

“You can’t keep doing this.”

“Doing what?” Ginny says.

“This.” Luna glances around her flat. “Missing practices. Interrupting your sleep to buy things for us … for me, really. Living here.”

“Luna,” Ginny says, arching a brow, “I know I played like shit today. I don’t need it from you as well as the tabloids.” She pours a glass of water from her wandtip. “God, I bet they’ll say I’ve been missing practices because I’m having all-day threesomes with Harry and Pansy.”

“You need to go back to your life,” Luna says gently.

Ginny’s nonchalance fades. She places both wand and glass on the counter and faces Luna. “It’s still there, though. It’s still happening.”

Luna wipes the suds from her hands on a towel that shivers. “Yes, it’s there, but I don’t know if it will ever fully go away, so that really mustn’t determine anything.” As she looks at Ginny, her eyes prickle. “I won’t go back there. It’s all right. Please start your practices again. Go home.”

There’s a pause.

“I’ll start practices again, yeah,” Ginny says quietly. “You actually want me to go home?”

“I don’t want you to stay and worry.”

“What if I stay and I don’t worry?”

Luna hesitates. Heat is moving slowly through her body. She turns back to the dishes and starts the tap again. “Then that would be all right,” she says.

That night, they slip into bed together as they have for a fortnight, but the closeness feels changed. Luna lets her body fall hesitantly back into Ginny’s, and she feels the shape of Ginny’s body, the soft press of her breasts against her back, the way Ginny’s T-shirt is slipping up her thighs. Ginny moves more slowly than usual as she drapes her arm over Luna’s waist and pulls her close until Luna can feel the edge of Ginny’s mouth just at the nape of her neck.

Then Luna is turning over in Ginny’s arms and they are moving into each other, Ginny’s head tilting one way and Luna’s the other, shifting in such effortless concert that when their lips meet it feels preordained.

Silence. Lightness fills Luna’s head and body so suddenly that she feels like something buoyant released in deep water, shooting up to a pressureless place. Ginny’s mouth is as warm and rough as her hands, which curl loosely around Luna’s forearms.

Luna’s eyes have fallen shut. She tilts her head up and thinks, _Please._ There must have been some supplication in her body because Ginny does turn Luna back against the mattress, then, pressing her into place, and Luna lets herself be turned and pressed, feeling Ginny’s knees settle on either side of her hips. Ginny is careful as she touches Luna, as her tongue moves along the curve of Luna’s lower lip, and for a while Luna just lies still, making sounds of weak encouragement, holding on tightly to the sheets but feeling nothing other than Ginny, something trembling more and more rapidly in her chest like an agitated molecule. Then she can’t stay still anymore. She takes hold of Ginny’s waist and they tip to the side again, and Ginny’s T-shirt is up around her waist and Luna’s hands are running up her thighs and over her hips and around to her back, where she feels the flex of lumbar muscle and the ridges of her vertebrae, and she takes her fingertips up over the freckles and moles that make up Ginny’s topography.

She touches Ginny. Nothing shatters.

* * *

So Luna begins to wake up alone, and the first thing she feels is the flat rolling in waves over her like heavy perfume, but she continues what Ginny has helped her begin. She leaves the flat every day, and when she has no errands to run, she walks through bookshops or art galleries, both Wizarding and Muggle. She has brief, polite conversations with people in those places and she looks at their faces and considers the human webworks of their lives. After lunch, she returns to the flat, and Ginny Floos back in halfway through the afternoon, freshly showered and ravenous.

“Ron’s been in touch,” Ginny says one evening as they’re finishing dinner. “He and Hermione are trying to pick a date for our Christmas reunion. The eighteenth all right?”

“Yes, of course,” Luna says. “I’d be very happy if we saw each other more often, actually.”

“Would you?” Ginny looks surprised. “Ron mentioned you stopped owling a couple years ago.”

“Yes, I worried I would disrupt their lives.”

Ginny shakes her head, grinning. “Luna, with Rose smashing up that house, an owl from you would be a welcome bit of order. They love you, all right? Ron said he missed your letters, they love hearing from you.”

“I’m glad. I love them, too.” Luna smiles, then glances out the window. It’s early December and the snow hasn’t stuck, but it’s left the pavements gleaming and shivering. She looks back at Ginny. “How much have you told them?”

“About what happened at the Department? Nothing.” Ginny hesitates. “I still only know what you told me that first night.”

“I don’t think I could explain it very well.”

“Try,” Ginny says.

So Luna begins, haltingly, to describe the events of the previous months. Ginny is patient in the silences and never stares like Luna’s gone mad. Of course, Ginny has experience with the feeling of insanity.

Minute by minute, then by hour, Luna begins to find the vocabulary. Over their emptied plates, she describes the awakened objects around them, how even now they breathe and stir and remind her of the world’s crushing yet liberating vastness, and her own smallness. She describes the blank disdain for human concerns, which, when viewed at such a distance, are of course ridiculous. At last, she describes the Unhole, how it has existed in the Department of Mysteries for longer than she can guess. It was no mistake, Luna theorises, that the Unhole brought her to the Department at the very moment that Ginny was due to leave the country, at the moment of Luna’s greatest loneliness and vulnerability. She describes the way it knew her.

“It doesn’t know you,” Ginny says. After hours of listening, it’s the first protest she’s made.

“It does,” Luna says. “That’s how it chose me. It knew the conditions of my life.”

“Yeah, conditions, sure,” Ginny says. “But does it know that you leave your hair all over the shower wall and that you’ll literally spit out food if it’s got cilantro in it?”

Luna smiles, standing and bringing their dishes to the sink. “Very funny.”

“I’m serious.” Ginny stands too, spinning their empty wine glasses. “That’s part of knowing someone. Maybe not when you’re an ageless, omniscient magical entity, but when you’re a human being, yeah.” Ginny flicks her wand at the wine glasses, which foam up, then empty out. She hangs them to dry and leans against the counter. “I mean, tell me something you know about me.”

Luna smiles. She could answer this question for a thousand pages. “Your favourite goal style is the Khushk Return,” she says.

“Right in one. What a head rush.” Ginny grins. “And? What else?”

“You never gift someone a book you haven’t read yourself.” Luna sets the last of the dishes in the rack, dries her hands, and turns to Ginny. “You play the Weird Sisters when you sort laundry. You do have a favourite brother but you’ll never tell anyone who it is. You actually don’t like the taste of firewhisky but you drink it because it’s beautiful. It’s been nineteen years but you still can’t stand the smell of paint. You love captaining the team because when people trust you, it makes you trust yourself.”

Ginny’s smile has softened. “Yeah,” she says. “And I don’t think those things mean anything in the course of a thousand years or the shape of the universe, but it means everything to me that you know them.”

* * *

Luna returns to the Department of Mysteries just once more, eight months later. She comes in broad daylight, but she isn’t questioned, and she doesn’t encounter any Unspeakables on her way toward the Chamber of the Small Mystery of Epiphany.

She finds everything just where she left it: the Unhole, the ancient records, and by the door, her journal.

She picks up the book. This is what she came for, but when she flips open the cover, she sees that the pages hold only one sentence, neatly printed in her hand.

_I am entering the Unhole  
I am entering the Unhole  
I am entering the Unhole  
I am entering the Unhole  
I am entering the Unhole  
I am entering the Unhole_

Still, she takes the journal when she goes, her past selves tucked safely beneath her arm.

There will be no article about the Unhole. After ten years of ontomagical theory, Luna has left the field. Her final paper was less a study than a personal essay, published to a small amount of interest among specialists.

 _I have devoted my adult life to questions of what magic is,_ she wrote, _and what, by proxy, magicians are. I have banished myself into the subterranean cracks of the magical world, to the verge of nonbeing, and I return with the sobering news that magicians are no more than human beings. Though we may play in the shallow edges of magic, we have nothing to do with its deepest, oldest currents. Like all people, our lot is to burn an instant, extinguished immediately._

_To stare into these facts of human life is to stare into the indifferent and often incomprehensible brutality of nature. But equally incomprehensible are the moments of beauty and pleasure in being human, the way the appeal of light glancing off running water cannot be explained. There is loveliness in the wilderness, and somewhere, perhaps beneath a rocky overhang or the boughs of a tree, there is also shelter._

As Luna walks out through the labyrinth, there is the faintest hum around her. It’s a remnant of the awakening that she hasn’t felt for months—but she isn’t worried. She plans her day in her mind. She will go up through the jangling lifts to the Ministry Atrium. From there, she will Floo out into Ginny’s townhouse, where they’ve moved all of Luna’s furnishings. She will walk up the street to Diagon Alley, where she will report to her job at the small and woefully underfunded Office for Zoomagical Conservation. She will take her daily Portkey out of London and delve into wild places to monitor endangered creatures, ensuring they're kept safe throughout the duration of their delicate life cycles. This new position, like her old work, has irregular seasons and distant assignments, but there is a groundedness to it that makes Luna feel rooted.

These thoughts are strong and vivid, and as Luna thinks them through, the hum fades to nothing. She holds her little life fondly and carefully in her mind. After the day’s work, perhaps she will visit George at Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes, or write a letter to Harry, Ron, Hermione, or Neville from the shade of Fortescue’s ice cream parlour. As she watches the busy street, her thoughts will stray to unknowable places, and she will consider certain mysteries, but they will not destabilise her so very much. Then she will meet Ginny somewhere to eat together, and then they will go back to their home.

**Author's Note:**

> alternate title for this story: “Simile Practice”
> 
> thanks for reading :) other works that inspired or informed this story include:
> 
>   * Sally Rooney’s _Conversations With Friends_
>   * Debra Granik’s _Leave No Trace_
>   * all fanart of Ginny done by @blvnk-art on tumblr
>   * “Turn Out the Lights” and “Claws in Your Back” by Julien Baker
>   * Stanley Kubrick’s _The Shining_
>   * Alex Garland’s _Annihilation_
>   * (specifically the movies of these last two, I haven’t read the source novels yet)
> 



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